by Martyn Burke
But right when Mother’s genius was about to be franchised to an unsuspecting art world, Albert’s other big scheme—the self-heating coffee mug—somehow caught fire, which spread to mother’s turpentine, and the only money they made was from the insurance claim.
After that, they spent a lot of time going to seminars held at hotel ballrooms where guys who used hair dryers and looked in the mirror a lot told hundreds of people how they could get rich quick just by signing up for expensive lessons in how to make fortunes that would pay for those expensive lessons. But after about a year of this, Mother and Albert had signed up for so many lessons they were going broke. They started making me answer the phone, because usually it was some collection agency threatening to sue them if they didn’t pay what they owed on one of those sets of lessons. By the age of sixteen, I had already run out of ways to throw those bill collectors off their trail. Whenever I answered the phone: Oh they died. Is there a message?
Or: They have early Alzheimer’s.
Or: They were in a terrible car crash. They’ll be late.
Later Mother insisted that, being married to Albert, she should have applied for POW status. But I don’t remember it that way. Sure, he was someone who had probably practiced road rage on his tricycle, but she could go toe-to-toe with him any time. I think that was part of the attraction.
For all those years, until Mother finally threw Albert out of the house, I pretty much existed on my own. It wasn’t that she didn’t care or was a bad mother. It was simply that she lived in a world where she was the only inhabitant. So I tried to do the same. And told myself that I was surviving just fine.
Until Annie Boo.
Legally known as Ann Boudreau.
She could have wrapped me up and taken me home. Maybe it was shell shock from being around Annabelle and Albert. But I loved her from the first moment I saw her. I didn’t think that kind of thing ever happened in real life. It does. At least, it does if you believe you’ve been wandering through darkness your whole life, just waiting for a woman’s crinkly little grin to light the way. A woman who looks at you for the first time like she’s known you from before you even existed.
Annie had grown up in Venice—not the real Venice but the phony Los Angeles Venice, a couple of miles away from where I lived. Her family home was a crumbling old cottage on one of the manmade canals that became fetid in the decades they served as scenery for aging hippies. Annie never really had a bed or a room of her own because her flower-child parents formed serial karmic alliances with kindred souls they found on the Venice Boardwalk down at the beach. Those instantly kindred souls were often invited back to the little cottage where, in the dope-addled ebullience of a new and perfect spiritual connection, they were given Annie’s room while she and her twin sister slept on the couch for as long as it took for that connection to fester into the inevitable recriminations of negativity, ripped-off stashes, or sexual imperialism. Which was when Annie and her sister would get the room back until the next round of karmic bliss blew through the cottage.
A week before I met her she had dropped out of Santa Monica College, deciding that hotel management was not for her; she was dressed in a long, flowing cotton skirt and blouse that would make a rainbow look drab.
With a bandana around her windblown blonde hair, she sat at a folding table on the Boardwalk and told fortunes. I didn’t know when I first saw her that she wouldn’t accept money for telling fortunes. And also that she didn’t really believe she had any kind of fortune-telling abilities. “I do it to make people feel better,” she said. “Isn’t that enough?”
And it was. Her reward was watching people ingest all the hope and confidence that came from whatever she told them. They’d come in beaten down and leave high on the fumes of the future as they now believed it.
When I first noticed her—overheard her, actually—I was one of the production assistants in a film crew shooting a commercial for some new cell phone. I was sitting on a bench almost on the sand and heard a woman’s voice. She was talking to a little old man who was dressed more like he’d just wandered off from a retirement home than someone hanging around the Venice Boardwalk. He was gaunt and wore glasses that slipped around his nose as if they had once been fitted to a larger face.
“She wants you to eat more,” were the first words I ever heard from Annie as she peered from the crystal ball to the old man.
“I can’t. Meals were always our time together. Without her, I can’t.”
“She wants you to. Your wife is worried about you.”
“She is? You can see that?” He looked like he was going to cry. “But she died eight months ago.”
Annie just nodded with that smile of hers that could have warmed an icecap.
Then he did start to cry. “Oh god. She’s worried? About me?”
“Yes. She wants you to go out and buy—” Annie paused, staring more intently into that crystal ball. “—I see some kind of food she used to make. It’s . . . it’s—”
“Lasagna?” said the old man, looking amazed. “You see lasagna?”
“It’s coming clearer now. Yes.” Annie was fixed on that crystal ball. “That’s what she wants you to go out and buy; take it home and eat it tonight.”
“No one makes it like she did.”
“She says you don’t want to upset her, do you?”
“Oh god, no.” The little old man was smiling and crying at the same time.
“And she says she loves you,” said Annie Boo, staring into the crystal ball.
“Oh, thank you.” The old man softly draped his dappled hand across Annie’s arm. “Thank you.”
Some people are just born with a smile and they can’t suppress it no matter how life conspires against them. Annie was one of those people. From the moment she noticed me watching her from that bench, I was positive she knew what I knew—that we just got each other. Words were superfluous. Introductions unnecessary. We just knew. No attempt at impressing one another would withstand the zapping force of sly eye-rolls and slow headshakes, framed by that grin of hers that might as well have had a magnet built into it.
“I see a snoopy person listening to fortune-telling sessions that aren’t meant for him,” she said to no one in particular, staring into the crystal ball after the old man had left.
“What if that snoopy person was only sitting down to rest his tired feet and isn’t really convinced that the crystal ball saw lasagna?”
“You know, that’s the trouble with the world. No sense of magic.”
“Oh, I’m not so sure of that. You probably got him to eat.”
“He looked like he’d been starving himself since his wife died. So, where’s the harm in a little magic?”
“Yeah,” I said, thinking about it. “Magic is good.”
“I’m Annie.”
And she actually smiled the next day when she was presented with the latest get-rich-quick scheme that my mother had latched onto (battery-illuminated crystal balls), and, even better, when Annabelle tried to convince Annie of her theories on wealth and karma, she sat attentively listening, gently smiling.
And then Annie Boo went back to peering into a crystal ball—the one without the battery-operated illumination—and used her magic to tell people variations of what they wanted to hear, what would lessen whatever terrible battles they were fighting, and she did it with that crinkly little smile that became a beacon in some of my darkest nights.
Maybe it was because she touched me. It was her most natural response, her default gesture, reaching out and feathering her hand across my arm as that smile of hers encircled me. It was all that I had never known before. No one in my world ever touched. It was as if one of the senses had been stricken from the family repertoire, to be replaced with the heaviness of the arch question, the reproachful silence. The theatrical swoon.
With Annie it was all lightness, simply flitting across the surface on the wings of a smile. At the time, I needed that. And was grateful for it.
; When Annie Boo and I kissed that first time, right after she met my mother, I told myself the planets had said to hell with karma and wealth and all the rest of it and had simply aligned the way they were meant to. Never before or since have I felt that strange simplicity of completeness that came from giving and receiving what was missing in each of us. We just filled in the spaces within each other in some quiet, warm way that makes me ache with longing when I remember those moments, the ones in the little guest house I was renting not far from the Santa Monica Pier. It was one of those 1920s cottage appendages with no insulation, and when the nights were chilled with the ocean dampness, all we had for warmth was each other. The nights drifted by in a kind of bliss that I told myself would go on forever.
She could be playful and loving and would sometimes gently sing an old hippie folksong, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” and to this day its lyrics haunt me as I hear that sweetly laughing voice. Singing about the sun rising in my eyes. And the gifts she said I gave, gifts of the moon and the stars.
I believed her when she sang to me, maybe because I desperately wanted to believe.
But then one night she stopped singing and said, “Please don’t love me.” And a week later she made the same request.
Why? The word would come thundering through my head, sometimes spoken, other times strangled into silence.
“I want you to be safe,” was all she would say. Again I would ask why, and she would look away and say something about not being able to explain it.
Which is when I would tell her, “I have no choice.”
And I didn’t.
• • •
And somewhere around here I think I stopped telling myself that no one ever really lets you down, you just misjudge them. I stopped because I had to. That was where I really had no choice. I loved Annie. And by loving her I began grasping at all that held her aloft, floating like a feather over whatever reality kept me bolted to the world I understood. And to ease the pain, I began floating too, suddenly untethered from all that had allowed my world to make sense. Drifting into the tabloid sugar-highs of disposable fame and sexual scandal. It is the air we all breathe now.
Like I said, Afghanistan made more sense.
3
In that infinite constellation of reasons as to why otherwise rational young guys would risk getting killed by vaporization, dismemberment, and whatever else could be dreamed up by the medieval minds we were facing, you have to start at the top and work your way to the bottom. Which, in the pecking order of noble intentions, would probably be where Danny and I resided.
At the top are those guys who are practically shrink-wrapped in the flag. They get it! And no matter how hard I try to be like them, I never get there. Cast from some alloy of history and patriotism, they know exactly why they’re risking the package. They’re the guys who look you right in the eye as they coat you with a thick layer of geopolitical goo beginning with September 11 and working back to some wormhole in your convictions as they remind you how you’d damn well better atone by charging into the great machine gun of history. These guys never blink. I envy them. I love having them in my platoon. But I sure as hell won’t be hanging out with them, telling war stories years from now.
In the vast middle are the guys who are over here because they can’t stand mortgage payments, PTA meetings, malls, marriage counseling, plumbing courses, and all the other avatars of two thousand years of testosterone distilled into a single drop of present-day ambivalence. Over here in the war, that one little drop gets redistilled into a hundred-proof buzz that comes out shooting flames. These guys cling to war because they’ve peered into the abyss and seen themselves punching a time clock for the rest of their lives.
And then there’s me and Danny. I now know it was no accident we found each other in this maelstrom.
Right from the moment he asked about us being the unit with the psychic, I knew each of us was there because of a woman.
• • •
I am here because I fled. What I left behind was the reflected surfaces of more reflected surfaces. From Venice Beach to the clubs in L.A., everything had gotten so shiny that you’d go blind in the klieg lights of other people’s hustles. Or maybe it was your own hustle coming back at you. That was the thing: You could never really tell.
Looking back on it all, I fled because I loved Annie Boudreau. I loved her in spite of those cortical neurons desperately firing reason into my thoughts in a futile attempt to fight off all the dopamine that got unleashed whenever I laid eyes on her.
In other words, Annie Boo had become kind of like a drug.
It was overwhelming me. With that same damn dream. But not exactly a dream, maybe more like a 3D nightmare on a loop, the one where I was on the shore running into the water with her, laughing and splashing until I realized she was somehow being pulled out to sea. I kept plunging in after her, reaching for her outstretched hand. But every time I lunged through the currents and almost grasped her, she was pulled farther away from me. I was in over my head, flailing at the water and reaching out, yelling at her to swim back toward me. But whatever it was that was pulling at her had her in its grasp and she receded farther out to sea.
The whole time, she was smiling, laughing even, and waving at me as she was swept out until she was nothing but a tiny speck of color in a vast gray sea of nothingness.
And then it would start all over again. Exactly the same, each time. Night after night.
After one of these nocturnal debacles, I went straight for Self-Help Shrink 101 and told myself, okay, you’re freaked out over some force (read: Hollywood, money, drugs, rich guys—whatever) corrupting Annie Boo and taking her away from you. And meanwhile she’s pleading and trying to figure it out herself as she tells you how much she loves you. So, big deal—other people have had to cope with worse. Get over it/deal with it/move on.
And all that.
But I couldn’t deal with it. That sea I was lunging through on a nightly basis was filling up with acid. I had to get out of there before I dissolved in it. But I couldn’t help it. I was in love—that awful, joyous kind of love that drains off all reason. To me, Annie Boo was like one of those perfect flowers that sometimes sprout in asphalt. You wonder how they could ever survive. And with her background, survival was a feat that made anything I’d endured seem puny.
I ripped away every self-protective instinct I possessed. At the same time as I stopped really knowing who—or what—Annie Boo was.
But all I did know was that I was trying to reach her, trying to help her come through those long metal nights of snorting press clippings, sleeping on mirrors, and Botoxing her innocence.
The changes in her terrified me. Once they started, she shed her layers of contentment until all that joy had been boiled down to a husk of sheer want. Angry want. Merely walking on the beach at sunset became a frivolous waste of time when there was preparing to be done: nails, hair, lingerie, makeup—everything that constituted a ticket into the back of one of the limos cruising Hollywood Boulevard. And also everything that led up to the three A.M. call, sitting on some filthy curb in her party dress, weeping into her cell phone, a bottle of Veuve Clicquot dangling from her hand like something from a charm bracelet as she slurred proclamations of her love for me.
All I could do was listen. I’d never felt more powerless in my life. I should have let the phone ring. But I always answered.
I couldn’t help it. I loved her.
The thing about L.A., what it has honed, to an inquisitional knife’s edge, is the ability to sense desperation. Show desperation, and the blades of a thousand smiles will leave you begging for a merciful end, confessing to the tabloids and the entertainment shows that carve off little pieces of you before you even feel the pain. That’s what happens to you in that wilderness of shininess. There’s no guidebook to help you cut a path through the endless thicket of smiles. And no retracing of steps. In the end, you’re on hands and knees, groping for the map you lost on the trail. But it d
oesn’t matter now. Because there’s simply nothing left of the you you thought you were.
When I grew up there, L.A. seemed normal to me. But not now. Somewhere in all this mess it became the promiscuous virgin, flaying you in temptations while chanting rules you had to follow. In the nights after it ended between Annie Boo and me, I would spend hours up in the parking areas off Mulholland Drive, high above the endless city, sitting there drinking beer and watching the lights flicker into infinity. And wondering where in all that congealed tangle of asphalt and desire she was. It would have been easier to find her in a jungle.
And even now, I was wondering what she was.
So Afghanistan, for all its cold, exhausting terror, was a kind of relief. But still, the memories of Annie Boo weighed more than the weapons I carried. It was just all part of what I thought being in love was about.
Until I met Danny. He humbled me. It wasn’t his intention but he did, just by listening to him talk about his days with Ariana as we drifted toward sleep in the cold fastness of those mountains. What he murmured wasn’t what I understood went on between any two people who were attracted to each other. It went way beyond that. What I was listening to was practically a commingling of souls. And long after he fell asleep, I would lie there wondering why the weight of my memories of Annie seemed even heavier.
4
Sometime late in that first month, I saw Annie again down on the Boardwalk, telling fortunes. But this time something was wrong. It was Annie but it wasn’t.
